The argument is axiomatic in a mathematical sense. And just like with mathematics, it is a matter of grasping the nature of the symbols used and how they relate to one another. You need to understand what the Absolute is in order to understand why it must include the Infinite and so forth. Apparently, this appears to be teh hard for most people, which to me is inexplicable. And to explain this sort of thing feels like trying to explain to somebody why 2+2=4. If you don't get it, no amount of "proof" (using the word in its rightful logico-mathematical sense, I.E., not proof in a purely physical or material sense) is going to help you.

As for physics (as in, modern physics), this is a science which arises from a philosophical postulate (that only the quantitative is real) and then it pretends that the study of the merely quantitative is beyond all philosophy. Indeed, all that matters now is the study of quantity, everything else can just be dismissed before hand. And then came Quantum physics, a science that is in desperate need of a new philosophy because the res extensa of Descartes doesn't cut it anymore. This is quite ironic considering how much science wanted to believe it had nothing to do with philosophy, conveniently forgetting that its understanding of the world was based on a specific philosophy (Cartesian dualism, precisely). The discoveries of modern science are now questioning this philosophical paradigm, which scientists absolutely don't want to give up, with the result that the entire scientific establishment is becoming schizophrenic. As for the average person, who's mindset is still rooted in Cartesian dualism, stuff like Quantum mechanics appears to be incomprehensible to them, because they cannot reconcile what they are being told with the way they have understood reality since they were born.

The Interior Ministry said the migrants left for Sweden in the context of a government incentive scheme and were granted $3,500 each upon departure. They are encouraged to leave Israel voluntarily and to promise not to return.

Four years ago, long before he’d join the Heritage Foundation, before Marco Rubio was even in the Senate, Jason Richwine armed a time bomb. A three-member panel at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government accepted Richwine’s thesis, titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.” In it, Richwine provided statistical evidence that Hispanic immigrants, even after several generations, had lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites. Immigration reformers were fools if they didn’t grapple with that."Visceral opposition to IQ selection can sometimes generate sensationalistic claims—for example, that this is an attempt to revive social Darwinism, eugenics, racism, etc,” wrote Richwine. “Nothing of that sort is true. … an IQ selection system could utilize individual intelligence test scores without any resort to generalizations.”This week, Heritage released a damning estimate of the immigration bill, co-authored by Richwine. The new study was all about cost, totally eliding the IQ issues that Richwine had mastered, but it didn’t matter after Washington Post reporter Dylan Matthews found the dissertation. Heritage hurried to denounce it—“its findings in no way reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation”—and Richwine has ducked any more questions from the press.His friends and advisers saw this coming. Immigration reform’s political enemies know—and can’t stand—that racial theorists are cheering them on from the cheap seats. They know that the left wants to exploit that—why else do so many cameras sprout up whenever Minutemen appear on the border, or when Pat Buchanan comes out of post-post-post retirement to write another book about the “death of the West?”Academics aren’t so concerned with the politics. But they know all too well the risks that come with research connecting IQ and race. At the start of his dissertation, Richwine thanked his three advisers—George Borjas, Christopher Jenks, and Richard Zeckhauser—for being so helpful and so bold. Borjas “helped me navigate the minefield of early graduate school,” he wrote. “Richard Zeckhauser, never someone to shy away from controversial ideas, immediately embraced my work.”Yet they don’t embrace everything Richwine’s done since. “Jason’s empirical work was careful,” Zeckhauser told me over email. “Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error. However, Richwine was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy.”Borjas’ own work on immigration and inequality has led to a few two-minutes-hate moments in the press. He wasn’t entirely convinced by Richwine, either.“I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don't really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration, etc,” Borjas told me in an email. “In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I've long believed this, I don't find the IQ academic work all that interesting. Economic outcomes and IQ are only weakly related, and IQ only measures one kind of ability. I've been lucky to have met many high-IQ people in academia who are total losers, and many smart, but not super-smart people, who are incredibly successful because of persistence, motivation, etc. So I just think that, on the whole, the focus on IQ is a bit misguided.”But Richwine had been fascinated by it, and for a very long time, in an environment that never discouraged it. Anyone who works in Washington and wants to explore the dark arts of race and IQ research is in the right place. The city’s a bit like a college campus, where investigating “taboo” topics is rewarded, especially on the right. A liberal squeals “racism,” and they hear the political correctness cops (most often, the Southern Poverty Law Center) reporting a thinkcrime.I saw this for the first time in 2006. During the backlash to the McCain–Graham immigration bill, the young paleo-conservatives Marcus Epstein and Richard Spencer founded the Robert Taft Club, a debating society that would welcome taboo ideas and speakers. They did so, and the SPLC then branded them “hateful”—it was the way of things. But I’d sometimes attend those events, as a reporter. In 2006, they invited American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor to a debate on race and conservatism. Years later, a few reporters condemned James O’Keefe because he’d been in the room. They botched the story, accusing O’Keefe of planning the event, when he’d merely shown up. The lesson everyone took away from this? Well, of course the left would blow up anything you said about race into a controversy. That was no reason to stop doing it.Richwine either relished in the controversy or didn’t care. In 2008, while at the American Enterprise Institute, he joined a panel discussing a new book from Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “Decades of psychometric testing,” said Richwine, “has indicated that at least in America you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, and then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics, and then blacks. These are real differences. They’re not going to go away tomorrow.”Even in that room, conservatives tried to distance themselves from Richwine’s remark. “It's looking at America in 1965 and assuming that's what we always were,” said Krikorian. Even Richwine added some caveats. “I point out that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was given an IQ test in the Netherlands and did very poorly,” he said. “[It’s] hard to imagine someone brighter.”But Richwine was winning fans on the nativist right. Marcus Epstein was in the audience, asking a question, then writing the event up favorably at the anti-immigration site VDare.com. Over the years, VDare’s Steve Sailer would point to Richwine’s work and charts to reveal cold truths about racial IQ differentials. In March 2009, he shared Richwine’s calculations “from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey of the backward digit span subtest from the Wechsler IQ test.” Immigrants from Mexico had IQs, on average, 18 points lower than those of white Americans.Throughout 2009, Sailer pointed readers to Richwine’s research on IQ and crime rates. He doesn’t recall whether he talked to Richwine personally, but Richwine never really put up a wall between his work and the endorsements of nativists. While at AEI he got to know Richard Spencer, the other Taft Club founder, and another thinker who laughed at the constant denunciations of “hate watchers.” In 2010, as first noticed by Yahoo News’ Chris Moody, Richwine wrote a couple of pieces for Spencer’s new white nationalist magazine Alternative Right. His debut story demolished a piece by the pro-immigrant legalization conservative Ron Unz. “His reason is superficially plausible—the sole offense of some Hispanics in federal custody may be an illegal border crossing,” wrote Richwine. Alas, as numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics would prove, “Unz is wrong when he says that Hispanics are no more criminal than whites. Hispanics are, in fact, substantially more likely than whites to commit serious crimes, and U.S.-born Hispanics in particular are about two and a half times more likely.”At his day jobs, on the mainstream right, Richwine wasn’t usually this blunt. He might cite the Bell Curve in an article for AEI’s magazine, but there was no thinkcrime there—he’d thanked Charles Murray in his dissertation. When he joined Heritage, Richwine wrote only rarely about immigration, applying his statistical acumen more often to public pension crises and student loans. “His mistake is that he wrote about a taboo subject,” Charles Murray told the New Republic yesterday. “And to write about IQ and race or ethnicity is to take a very good chance of destroying your career. And I really hope that doesn’t happen.”It’s happening right now. According to Politico, Heritage is on the hunt for a PR guru who might spin away the Richwine story. On the paleo right, that’s being interpreted as a nolo contendere admission of thinkcrime. VDare’s writers have defended Richwine as a statistician whose work people prefer to hyperventilate about than to debunk, because they can’t debunk it. “The forces of orthodoxy have identified a heretic,” wrote John Derbyshire, who was laid off from National Review last year after writing that he’d educated his children about racial differences. “They’re marching on his hut with pitchforks and flaming brands. The cry echoes around the Internet: ‘Burn the witch!’ ”Anyone could have predicted it. Richwine didn’t mind taking on taboos or talking to taboo people. That’s how immigration reform foes talk amongst themselves. That’s not how they’re going to stop the bill.“In my estimation, our School gives too much emphasis on moving from findings to policy implications in scholarly work,” said Harvard’s Richard Zeckhauser. “In many cases, merely presenting the facts would be a preferable way to go. That makes it much harder for one’s opponents to dismiss what you say, or to accuse you of manipulating facts to reach policy conclusions. Moreover, I believe that policy conclusions usually rest on one’s underlying values. If one complements one’s empirical assessments with values issues, those assessments get questioned, particularly if one addresses a controversial realm of policy, as Richwine surely did in his dissertation. In many contexts, one’s work will have a long run greater influence on policy if the facts are left to speak for themselves.”

When college women study science, they tend to gravitate toward biology--about 58 percent of all bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in biology go to women. In contrast, women earn some 17 percent of bachelor's degrees in engineering and computer science and just over 40 percent of bachelor's degrees in physical sciences and mathematics. The likely reason for this, found in the study The Mathematics of Sex" (2009) by Cornell psychologists Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, is that women tend to be drawn to "organic" fields involving people and living things, whereas men are more interested in the objects and abstractions that are the focus of STEM majors. Aversion to math plays a role too: a University of Bristol study finds that biologists tend not to pay attention to scholarly articles in their field that are packed with mathematical equations.

Yet the Obama administration sticks closely to the hard-line feminist argument that the problem is bias: women are somehow being denied access to STEM courses. On June 20 the White House announced that it would issue guidelines expanding the scope of Title IX to cover science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Extending Title IX from sports to math and science majors has been a longtime goal of the Obama White House. Longstanding Education Department rules interpreting Title IX have essentially set up a gender-based quota system. Back in 1972, when Congress passed Title IX, only 43 percent of those enrolled in degree-granting institutions were women; now, women make up 57 percent of college and university students. Furthermore, many, perhaps most, women have little interest in the team sports that draw many men into college athletics. So colleges have struggled to maintain Education Department-imposed gender parity in athletics, typically by reclassifying such female activities as yoga or cheerleading as "sports," or by eliminating varsity sports programs for men such as wrestling, fencing, and diving.

But lately, and especially under the Obama administration, the Education Department has been inserting Title IX aggressively into other aspects of college life. One of them is sexual misconduct, typified by the department's new rule demanding that colleges lower the standard of proof required to prove sexual assault in a campus disciplinary proceeding. And now the department has been asked to intervene in what is supposed to be a problem: that more women than men choose to major in the humanities--or biology--rather than in the math-intensive STEM fields. Yet the administration's view that bias reduces women's entry into STEM fields has little scholarly support. A task force from the National Academy of Sciences investigated 500 university science departments and concluded that men and women overall "enjoyed comparable opportunities," and that female candidates for jobs at major research universities actually had a slight edge over their male competitors.

Nonetheless, there is now an entire ideological industry that treats the gender imbalance in the hard sciences as a sexist disease that can be cured by a combination of re-education and coercion. Over the past decade, as Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out, the National Science Foundation has spent $135 million on gender-equity-promotion projects. The science money went to pay for, among other things, a staging of "The Vagina Monologues," the development of a game called Gender Bias Bingo, and workshops featuring skits in which male scientists mistreat their female colleagues, the New York Times's John Tierney noted. In 2010 Congress considered--but mercifully did not pass--a bill that would have paved the way for even more of those skits by using federal funds to establish "workshops to enhance gender equity" in academic science.

In early 2009 a newly inaugurated President Obama wrote a letter to the American Association of University Women and other advocacy groups arguing that Title IX could be used to make "similar striking advances" for women in science and engineering as it had in sports--via "necessary attention and enforcement." According to Manhattan Institute fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth, one federal agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has produced a manual, "Title IX and STEM," that recommends that every university hire a full-time "Gender Equity Specialist" with a staff that would monitor science departments and labs for bias. The manual also recommends that universities fund departments based on gender and other "diversity" representation. Expect the rules likely to be issued by the Education Department under White House prodding to be similar--with the penalty for noncompliance to be the loss of federal funds.

The use of Title IX to force universities to restructure their curricula and alter the composition of their hard-science and engineering departments in order to achieve a supposed gender equity that matches neither the aptitudes nor the interests of many women isn't just heavy-handed and totalitarian. As study after study indicates, it's bad science as well.

For instance. I believe that Michelangelo is a greater painter then Raphael. This is despite the fact the latter had a greater technique, a larger portfolio (since painting was a secondary activity to Michelangelo) and a bigger impact on the development of the art form. Thus, "reason" would dictate that Michelangelo cannot be a greater painter then Raphael.

My comparison of Michelangelo as a painter vis a vis Raphael was based on a pure act of intellection. I have not reasoned that Michelangelo is greater then Raphael, i simply know it, and i know it because my appraisal was intelligent

All this cannot stand against an argument that states that only that which can be "proven" by reason can possibly exist. Since i cannot "prove" my knowledge regarding Michelangelo as a painter versus Raphael, it will be argued that such knowledge does not in fact exist, and cannot possibly exist.